Leaving a peanut so that someone might break the shell to the nut inside.

Of Lawyers, Ironworkers, and Poets.

In my early 20s, I was an Ironworker, back in Southern Illinois, Local 392. I worked deep in the ground to tie rebar into a latticework for foundations. I worked 15 or 20 stories up, to connect beams and columns into a steel skeleton. And in my mid-twenties, I became a lawyer, licensed by the Supreme Court of California to tie together the beams and columns of “the law.” So, when I came across this essay by a fellow Ironworker on the website for the Poetry Foundation, and saw further that he traced the poems of lawyer Wallace Stevens, it was as if I had found a lost brother, someone separated from me by warring parents, but found again. He says that pulling a poem from somewhere in his cortex brings a sense of structure to the chaos, an Ironworker-like feeling of bringing shape to empty spaces. I know exactly what he means, nearly 40 years later. Those extraordinary early and mid 20s are part of the beams and columns that shape who I am today.

Roscoe Expertly Removing the Shell

Rewards Come To Those Hungry for What’s Within

Listen and See: The Divine Symphony

"If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence . . . "
- George Eliot, Middlemarch